Jerry's Book Information

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Brothers in Arms

The first African American tank unit was the 761st Battalion. The men first trained in Kentucky or Louisiana, then in Texas. The men from the North quickly learned their freedom was curtailed while they were in the South. At the time, black units were often trained, but not intended to ever leave the United States to fight the War. After the 761st completed training, they spent about two years playing "enemy" in war games against other tank units. But in 1944 761st Tank Battalion was sent over to Germany. They were put under General Patton's command and sent to the front. Patton visited them on their arrival and told them he asked for the because he only used "the best". Fortunately they never knew Patton's personal prejudices, not believing they were the best. Then these young men spent the next six months on the front, including in the Battle of the Bulge. They rarely had a break before ordered to join yet another artillary unit. Those six months proved the strength and courage of the men. In that time they had liberated towns, lost comrades and tanks, lost ground, gained ground, crossed the Rhine River, liberated prisoner of war camps, and even liberated a concentration camp, a sight none of them would forget. When Abdul-Jabbar was a teenager he knew one of the New York Transit's policemen. He found out many years later that Smitty, Leonard Smith, was one of the men who was part of the 761st Battalion. Abdul-Jabbar's interest increased in this forgotten chapter from World War II. He started speaking with and taking notes from the survivors of the 761st. Within a few years he was joined by Anthony Walton to write this book. The book centers on Smith's and two others' experiences, but the book applies to all in the unit. This is a vital telling of the true story of the black soldiers and their tanks in Europe in the winter of 1944 to 1945. Abdul-Jabbar and Walton have written this book in a casual, poignant narrative tone. The horrors of battles are described to sadden but not overwhelm the reader. Of course this is not only a war book, but a racial confrontation book. These American men were accepted more easily by the Europeans they met than their own countrymen. Heroic men exist everywhere, usually quietly. This is the illuminating story of one group of them.

Hugh Ambrose

The Pacific

The companion book to the HBO miniseries. Between America's retreat from China in late November 1941 and the moment General MacArthur's airplane touched down on the Japanese mainland in August of 1945, five men connected by happenstance fought the key battles of the war against Japan. From the debacle in Bataan, to the miracle at Midway and the relentless vortex of Guadalcanal, their solemn oaths to their country later led one to the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot and the others to the coral strongholds of Peleliu, the black terraces of Iwo Jima and the killing fields of Okinawa, until at last the survivors enjoyed a triumphant, yet uneasy, return home. In The Pacific, Hugh Ambrose focuses on the real-life stories of the five men who put their lives on the line for our country. To deepen the story revealed in the miniseries and go beyond it, the book dares to chart a great ocean of enmity known as The Pacific and the brave men who fought. Some considered war a profession, others enlisted as citizen soldiers. Each man served in a different part of the war, but their respective duties required every ounce of their courage and their strength to defeat an enemy who preferred suicide to surrender. The medals for valor which were pinned on three of them came at a shocking price-a price paid in full by all.

Fred Anderson

The War That Made America

A short history of the French and Indian War.

David Benioff

City of Thieves

Screenwriter David Benioff's splendid new novel, City of Thieves, opens as a screenwriter named David, curious about his grandparents' experiences in Russia during World War II, visits the retired couple in Florida and records cassette after cassette of his grandfather's tales. Finally, wearily, the old man ends the conversation. "A couple of things still don't make sense to me.", Benioff persists. "You're a writer," answers his grandfather. "Make it up." And so, apparently, he has. Exactly how much of this novel is true, and how much imagined, matters not a whit. The surreal wartime journey of 17-year-old Lev Beniov unfolds like a crazy and vivid dream (and, at times, a nightmare), but it has the rich texture of lived experience. The story opens in the winter of 1942 during the crushing Nazi siege of Leningrad. "You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold" are Lev's first words to us. A nervous virgin with a gift for chess and a bashful crush on his cello-playing neighbor, Lev watches the corpse of a German parachutist float down from the sky and goes to investigate. Lev drinks the dead man's cognac, steals his knife, and is promptly nabbed by the police for looting. Lev hasn't yet learned how to make his way in the world. But while in jail, he meets the consummate operator: Kolya, a handsome, irrepressible, Zorba-like soldier who was arrested for going AWOL from his regiment. You can tell Benioff is a screenwriter, because Lev and Kolya are a comic odd couple from a long Hollywood tradition. You're "a bit moody, in the Jewish way, but I like you," Kolya announces, and thereafter treats Lev as his soul mate. For Kolya, Lev feels a combination of envy, fascination, and suspicion. The colonel holding them prisoner offers them a deal: He'll set them free if they can track down a dozen eggs for his daughter's wedding cake. This ragtag pair hits the road, telling each other ribald stories, bantering about literature, and getting on each other's nerves. In ravaged Leningrad, they discover willing young women and unbelievable horrors, but no eggs. They venture out of the city and into the frozen countryside, where they spend the night with a cabin full of courtesans, briefly join a band of partisans, and are captured by the German army. Guns are fired, throats slashed, a love affair launched, and eventually, at a staggering price, eggs acquired. By listening carefully - and making the rest up - Benioff has produced a funny, sad, and thrilling novel.

Lou Berney

Gutshot Straight

Charles “Shake” Bouchon leaves prison intending to go straight. But, within hours, lovely, lethal Lexy Ilandryan, head of LA’s Armenian mob and Shake’s one-time lover, has him running an “errand” for her. The task seems simple: drive a car to Las Vegas and turn it over to Dick Moby, a 400-pound sadist who runs a strip club. Moby will give him a briefcase that he is to return to Lexy. Shake needs the three large Lexy hands him, but he quickly learns that nothing is as it seems; in short order, he’s ditched by a gorgeous young stripper who had been stuffed in the car’s trunk and is on the run from the Armenians and Moby’s able henchman. She’s also searching for the briefcase, which contains a priceless religious relic. Virtually every character is memorable, and the chemistry between Shake and Gina, the gorgeous and devious stripper, is brilliant. The plot turns are constant, and the dialogue is sharp. The bad guys are wonderfully scary, and the locales—Las Vegas and Panama—are vividly drawn.

R. B. Bernstein

Thomas Jefferson

A concise biography of Thomas Jefferson. Bernstein examines Jefferson's strengths and weaknesses, his achievements and failures, his triumphs, contradictions, and failings. Thomas Jefferson details his luxurious life as a Virginia gentleman to his passionate belief in democracy, from his tortured defense of slavery to his relationship with Sally Hemings. An architect, inventor, writer, diplomat, propagandist, planter, party leader Jefferson was multifaceted, and Bernstein explores these roles even as he illuminates Jefferson's central place in American enlightenment the "revolution of ideas" that did so much to create the nation we are today.

John Billheimer

Drybone Hollow

If failure analysis engineer Owen Allison has notions about returning to his life in California after an extended stay in his native West Virginia, those plans come to a halt when a local dam breaks, killing four people and sending a huge black river of coal sludge cascading throughout the region. Mine owner Anson Stokes wants to hire Owen to figure out what happened, and with a little luck, persuade an environmentalist judge not to shut down the rest of the mine. But soon Owen realizes that the stickiness of the situation has very little to do with the black goo basting everything in the area, as much as a dirty game of graft, corruption and greed. When a local woman goes missing, and various enterprising but not very bright individuals try to scam insurance companies, Owen gets a glimmer of the ugly truth someone will go to murderous lengths to hide.

Ben Bova

Mars Life

Jamie Waterman, who discovered cliff dwellings during his first trip to Mars, is struggling to acquire funding for continued research on the long-dead Martians, but his efforts are severely compromised by the increasing influence of religious fundamentalists. Their rise coincides with a global environmental crisis, giving the U.S. government another rationale for shifting resources away from Waterman's work. Even the discovery of a Martian fossil can't ensure the project's viability, and Waterman and his wife return to the red planet in a last-ditch effort to keep the exploration going. Bova deftly captures the excitement of scientific discovery and planetary exploration. Science and politics clash on two worlds as Jamie desperately tries to save the Mars program and uncover who the vanished Martians were.

James Brady

The Scariest Place in the World

Half a century after he fought there as a young lieutenant of Marines, James Brady returns to the brooding Korean ridgelines and mountains to sound taps for a generation. It’s been fifteen years since Brady first wrote of Korea in The Coldest War, drawing raves from Walter Cronkite and The New York Times, which called it “a superb personal memoir of the way it was.” In the spring of 2003, Brady and Pulitzer Prize–winning combat photographer Eddie Adams flew in Black Hawk choppers and trekked the Demilitarized Zone where it meanders into North Korea, interviewing four-star generals and bunking in with tough U.S. recon troops, in Brady’s words, “raw meat on the point of a sharpened stick.” Brady recalls that first time on bloody Hill 749, the men who died there, what happened to the Marines who lived to make it home, and experiences yet again the emotional pull of a lifelong love affair with the Corps in which they all served. Brady summons up the past and illuminates the present, be it the Korea of “the forgotten war,” the Yanks who fought there long ago, or today’s soldiers standing wary sentinel over “the scariest place in the world.” The result is uplifting, inspiring, often heartbreaking, and this new Brady memoir proves as powerful as his first.

The Marine

The Marine is Colonel James ("Oliver") Cromwell, a warrior forged at Notre Dame and the Berlin of Hitler's Olympics, and honed by combat at Guadalcanal as one of Carlson's Marine Raiders. With the world at peace, the thirty-five-year old Cromwell is restlessly, if pleasantly, beached on garrison duty in California, aware of how much he misses the war, when he is ordered to fresh duty beyond the seas, as military attache to the American ambassador in a dull Asian backwater half a world away. There, at dawn on a June Sunday, Ollie gets his wish for action. Korea violently erupts and Colonel Cromwell is caught up in the early, panicked, rout. While South Koreans cut and run, the first GIs hurried into battle are brushed aside by advancing Red tanks and tough peasant infantry. The Marine chronicles the war-hardened Cromwell's experience of the dramatic First Hundred Days of a brutal three-year Korean War, the chaos and cowardice of retreat, the last-ditch gallantry of the Pusan Perimeter, MacArthur's brilliant left hook sending Marines against the deadly seawall at Inchon, and the bloody assault to liberate Seoul and promote MacArthur's 1952 presidential ambitions. Ollie Cromwell's is the story of a "forgotten war" that never truly ended, but for a bitter truce along what a recent U.S. president called "the most dangerous border in the world."

Warning of War

This is an outstanding book. Late November of 1941. Half the world is at war and with the other half about to join in, a thousand U.S. Marines stand sentinel over the last days of an uneasy truce between ourselves and the Imperial Japanese Army in chaotic North China. By November 27, FDR is convinced Japan is about to launch a military action. Washington doesn't know where, isn't sure precisely when. But the Cabinet is sufficiently alarmed that War Secretary Henry Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox are authorized to send an immediate and coded "warning of war" to American bases and units in harm's way. In Shanghai two cruise ships are chartered and 800 armed American Marines are marched through the great port city with enormous pomp and circumstance and embarked for Manila. Another 200 Marines, unable to reach Shanghai, and serving in small garrisons and posts from Peking to Mongolia and the Gobi Desert, are caught short by this "warning of war". This is their story. Of how a detachment of American Marines marooned in North China as war erupts, set out on an epic march through hostile territory in an attempt to fight their way out of China and, somehow, rejoin their Corps for the war against Japan. James Brady dazzles us once again with a stunning and unflinching look at America at war. Warning of War is a moving tribute to sheer courage, determination, and Marine Corps discipline, and is a wonderful celebration of America in one of its darkest but finest hours.

The Marines of Autumn

This the second Brady book I've read recently. Both are excellent. It's November 1950 and the U.S.-led United Nations force commanded by General Douglas MacArthur has pushed the North Korean army back to the Taebek Mountains with the goal of crushing the enemy at China's border on the Yalu river and having "the boys" home by Christmas. However, ego and greater ambitions have blinded MacArthur and his chief of intelligence, General Ned Almond, to the possibility of Chinese intervention and he dangerously divides his force with the Army's Eighth Corps on the west of the Taebek range and the X Corps to the east. The Marines, attached to X Corps in the drive north, have their doubts about the Army's insistence China won't get involved and call Captain Thomas Verity back to active duty. Verity, an assistant professor of Chinese culture at Georgetown University, recently widowed and a single father of three-year-old Kate, speaks half-a-dozen Chinese dialects fluently. His father was a businessman working in China, where Tom was born and spent the first 15 years of his life. When the U.S. entered WWII, Tom dropped out of Yale a few semesters shy of graduating to enlist in the Marines and fought as an infantryman in the steamy jungles of Guadalcanal. After passing Officer Candidate School, Verity commanded a platoon as a lieutenant on Okinawa. With WWII over, Verity went back to China to intervene between Chang Kai-Shek's national army and Mao Tse Tseung's Communist revolution. Back at home, Verity is recalled from the reserves and reluctantly agrees to go to Korea for a month to listen to the radio for Chinese military activity. With the help of the career-minded Gunnery Sgt. Tate as communications specialist and the rascally Pvt. "Mouse" Izzo as driver, Verity links with the 1st Marine Division at the port city of Hamnung, North Korea and joins the Marines on the march north to the Chosin Reservoir. Along the way, the Marines' fears of Chinese intervention are confirmed as Verity reports hearing military activity on the radio. As the Marines soon discover, MacArthur's bold drive to the Chinese border went right into the Chinese army's trap. Twelve Chinese divisions smashed through the Eighth Corps and surrounded the Marines' three regiments on a single, narrow road that wound through snow-covered mountains.on Verity, Tate and Izzo find themselves caught in the middle of battle and have to fight alongside the Marines to get back to the safety of the sea at Hamnung.on James Brady goes all out in chronicling the Marines' infamous march back to the sea. The research was meticulous in depicting the chain of events, the frigid conditions the Marines lived in, the intensity of the combat, and the diverse personalities of the Marine leaders from the scholarly General Oliver P. Smith, who commanded the First Marine Division, to the colorful Brig. General Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller, who led the First Marine Regiment, and like his other work of fiction on Marines in Korea, 2003's The Marine, Brady doesn't pull any punches in attacking MacArthur's ego-based decisions. Then again, MacArthur was never really popular among Marines.on Brady, who led a Marine platoon in the Korean War, speaks from experience about combat: the underlying fear of death and maiming, and the amazing ability to keep fighting under duress. He also admits he drew Verity's character from his real-life company commander, former U.S. Senator and Secretary of Defense the late John Chafee.on The Marines of Autumn is a lasting triute to the Marines of the Korean War and, specifically, the Chosin Reservoir campaign. It ranks as one of the finest books on the Korean War that I have ever read and is an absolute must read for any military history enthusiast.

Marcus Brotherton

We Who Are Alive and Remain: untold stories from the Band of Brothers

Personal accounts from Frank Perconte, Shifty Powers, Joe Lesniewski, Earl, One Lung, McClung, and others in Easy Company of Band of Brothers fame (101st Airborne Division, 506th PIR) in World War II. Courage. Determination. Loyalty. Friendship. Twenty of the surviving Easy Company members tell stories of combat from Normandy through the end of World War II, and recount gritty-yet-poignant narratives of patriotism and freedom before and after the war.

R.V. Burgin

Islands of the Damned

The World War II battlefields in the Pacific were Islands of the Damned for those who fought there. R. V. Burgin, a Marine veteran of Cape Gloucester, Peleliu and Okinawa has aptly entitled his memoir. The terrain and climate and the savagery of an enemy who prepared to fight to the death compounded the sights, sounds, emotions and confusion of war. In this book, the author starkly relates what he saw and felt during those terrible months of battle.

Donovan Campbell

Joker One - A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage, Leadership and Brotherhood

Campbell decided as a junior at Princeton that attending Marine Corps Officer Candidate School would look good on his résumé. Three years later, in the spring of 2004, he was in Iraq commanding a platoon known by its radio call sign, “Joker One.” Campbell tells its story, and his, in an outstanding narrative of the Iraq War. Joker One counted around 40 dudes: country boys and smalltown jocks; a few Hispanics and a single black. Some were college men with futures; some had pasts they preferred to forget. The battalion was assigned to one of Iraq's worst hot spots: the city of Ramadi, where faceless enemies found shelter among 350,000 Iraqi civilians. Joker One fought from street to street, house to house and ambush to ambush for seven straight months. By the end of the tour, “even the Gunny's hands had started ceaselessly shaking,” Campbell writes. Faced with urgent life-and-death decisions, Campbell had learned that “there are no great options... you live with the results and shut up about the whole thing.” For all his constant self-questioning, Lt. Campbell brought Joker One home with only one KIA—a record as impressive as his account.

Richard Castle

Heat Wave

A New York real estate tycoon plunges to his death on a Manhattan sidewalk. A trophy wife with a past survives a narrow escape from a brazen attack. Mobsters and moguls with no shortage of reasons to kill trot out their alibis. And then, in the suffocating grip of a record heat wave, comes another shocking murder and a sharp turn in a tense journey into the dirty little secrets of the wealthy. Secrets that prove to be fatal. Secrets that lay hidden in the dark until one NYPD detective shines a light. Mystery sensation Richard Castle, blockbuster author of the wildly best-selling Derrick Storm novels, introduces his newest character, NYPD Homicide Detective Nikki Heat. Tough, sexy, professional, Nikki Heat carries a passion for justice as she leads one of New York City's top homicide squads. She's hit with an unexpected challenge when the commissioner assigns superstar magazine journalist Jameson Rook to ride along with her to research an article on New Yorkżs Finest. Pulitzer Prize-winning Rook is as much a handful as he is handsome. His wise-cracking and meddling aren't her only problems. As she works to unravel the secrets of the murdered real estate tycoon, she must also confront the spark between them. The one called heat.

Michael Connelly

Lost Light

Fed up with the hypocrisy of the LAPD, Harry Bosch has resigned and is forced to find a new way of life. But the life of a retiree doesn't suit him. He has always devoted himself to justice, and he is still drawn toward protecting or avenging those whom the law has failed. When he left the LAPD Bosch took a file with him, the case of a film production assistant murdered four years earlier during a $2 million robbery on a movie set. The LAPD, now operating under post 9/11 rules, think the stolen money was used to finance a terrorist training camp. Thoughts of the original murder victim are lost in the federal zeal, and when it seems the killer will be set free to aid the feds' terrorist hunt, Bosch quickly finds himself in conflict with both his old colleagues and the FBI. He cannot rest until he finds the killer, with or without a badge.

The Overlook

In his first case since he left the LAPD's Open Unsolved Unit for the prestigious Homicide Special squad, Harry Bosch is called out to investigate a murder that may have chilling consequences for national security. A doctor with access to a dangerous radioactive substance is found murdered on the overlook above the Mulholland Dam. Retracing his steps, Harry learns that a large quantity of radioactive cesium was stolen shortly before the doctor's death. With the cesium in unknown hands, Harry fears the murder could be part of a terrorist plot to poison a major American city. Soon, Bosch is in a race against time, not only against the culprits, but also against the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI (in the form of Harry's one-time lover Rachel Walling), who are convinced that this case is too important for the likes of the LAPD. It is Bosch's job to prove them all wrong.

The Closers

After three years out of the LAPD, Harry Bosch returns, to find the department a different place from the one he left. A new Police Chief has been brought over from New York to give the place a thorough clean up from top to bottom. Working with his former partner, Kiz Rider, Harry is assigned to the department's Open-Unsolved Unit, working on the thousands of cold cases that haunt the LAPD's files. These detectives are the Closers, they put a shovel in the dirt and turn over the past. By applying new techniques to old evidence they aim to unearth some hidden killers and bring them to justice, for "a city that forgets its murder victims is a city lost." Harry and Kiz are given a politically sensitive case when a DNA match connects a white supremacist to the 1988 murder of Rebecca Verloren, a sixteen-year-old girl. Becky was of mixed race, and the case appears to have a racial angle. This was LA before the riots and Rodney King; the city was a powder keg waiting for a match. The detectives who worked the case all those years ago seem to have done a decent job, but something doesn't fit. Meanwhile Harry's nemesis, Deputy Chief Irving, is watching him. In the new "clean" LAPD Irving has been sidelined to a meaningless job. Compelled by vengeance, he hopes that Harry will make a slip.

Gunnery Sgt. Jack Coughlin, USMC ret.

Kill Zone, A Sniper Novel

An American general is captured in the Middle East by terrorists who threaten to behead him within days. One strange fact: moments before he is rendered unconscious during the attack, the general notices that his captors speak American English. What's going on? Gunnery Sgt. Kyle Swanson, a top Marine sniper, is vacationing on a yacht in the Mediterranean when he receives orders to mount a top secret mission to rescue the general. But as the Marines prepare to land in the Syrian desert, they fall victim to a terrible accident. Swanson, the only survivor, then discovers they were also flying into an ambush. How did the enemy have details of a mission known only to a few top American government officials? Swanson takes off across the desert alone to find the captured general and realizes he is fighting a particularly ruthless and dangerous enemy: American mercenaries working for a very-high-level group of U.S. officials with ties to the White House itself, part of a clandestine conspiracy whose hidden goal is nothing less than total control of the American military. Their sworn enemy is the captured general whose fate now rests in Swanson's hands.

Dead Shot

In this follow-up to the highly successful Kill Zone, former Marine sniper Kyle Swanson faces his most deadly enemy yet, a legendary enemy sniper working with a fringe Islamic organization that has created a terrifying new weapon of mass destruction. In Baghdad's Green Zone, an Iraqi scientist is murdered just before he is to reveal the monstrous secret that Saddam Hussein took to his grave: the Palace of Death, home to a chemical weapon that Islamic militants quietly have been developing and whose formula is nearly complete. The assassination is the work of a mysterious sniper called Juba, who was originally trained by the British but now works with a twisted mastermind determined to wrest leadership of the terrorist world from Al Qaeda. Kyle Swanson, once the top sniper in the Marine Corps, has become the key member in a secret special operations team known as Task Force Trident. When Juba tests the new weapon by killing hundreds of people at a British royal wedding in London, Swanson is assigned to hunt down his old special ops rival. The birth of a new reign of global terror can be stopped only by a confrontation between the two best snipers in the world, a duel in which the first shot wins. Usually.

Clive Cussler

Plague Ship

This a typical Cussler book - action packed from start to finish. This book is the fourth in the Oregon Files series. It continues the exploits of the Oregon, a clandestine spy ship completely dilapidated on the outside, but on the inside packed with sophisticated weaponry and intelligence-gathering equipment. Captained by the rakish, one-legged Juan Cabrillo and manned by a crew of former military and spy personnel, it is a private enterprise, available for any government agency that can afford it - and now Cussler sends the Oregon on its most extraordinary mission yet. The crew has just completed a top-secret mission against Iran in the Persian Gulf, when they come across a cruise ship adrift in the sea. Hundreds of bodies litter its deck, and as Cabrillo tries to determine what happened, explosions rack the length of the ship. Barely able to escape with his own life and that of the liner's sole survivor, Cabrillo finds himself plunged into a mystery as intricate - and as perilous - as any he has ever known, and pitted against a cult with monstrously lethal plans for the human race...plans he may already be too late to stop.

David Dary

The Santa Fe Trail

The famous trail of romantic western lore was established in about 1610 by Spanish settlers of Mexico who had explored western and southern regions of North America long before the French and English arrived. Stretching 900 miles from its origin in Santa Fe through present-day Colorado and Kansas, the trail, originally a combination of many old paths worn down by buffalo, ends in Franklin, Mo. Enterprising Americans from the east soon discovered that the Spanish of Santa Fe and the nearby Indians had many material needs (cotton prints, factory products, including the latest guns and ammunition, whiskey) that they could supply very profitably. Thus the Santa Fe Trail came to be known as a key commercial link to the west. On their return trips, tradesmen brought back Mexican products like wool, buffalo hides and horses, mules, gold coins, gold dust and silver. Dary (Cowboy Culture; Red Blood and Black Ink, etc.), a leading historian of the Old West, draws on original newspaper stories, letters, diaries, books and expedition records to re-create the adventures of many tough and colorful people who endured a journey that might take more than two months, if they were lucky enough to survive severe hardship, bad weather, broken axles and marauding tribes. The Santa Fe Trail continued to serve as the heart of the "commerce of the prairies" until it was replaced in the 1860s by railroads.

P.T. Deutermann

The Moonpool

A private detective working in Wilmington, NC, is found dead in a convenience store restroom, apparently poisoned. But when her body sets off radiation alarms in the pathologist's lab, suspicion falls upon the nearby nuclear power station, a heavily guarded facility with supposedly fail-safe radiation control procedures. As the FBI, NRC, local police, and the power plant's own security team investigate, retired Sheriff's Office Lieutenant Cam Richter, owner of the detective agency which employed the dead woman, begins his own inquiries. What was his detective doing at the power plant? And how could she be poisoned by radiation without other people or places being exposed? Cam soon finds himself up against powerful forces that will stop at nothing to keep the plant's problems secret. The most vulnerable part of the plant is the Moonpool, an engineering slang term for the highly radioactive spent fuel storage pond which cools the spent uranium bundles. Racing against time, Cam uncovers an inside threat, a plan to use the plant's own systems to initiate an unstoppable, disastrous series of events.

Nightwalkers

A cast of eccentric Southern characters, several of whom could have escaped from the pages of Gone with the Wind, lifts Deutermann's winning fourth novel to feature PI Cam Richter (after The Moonpool). Cam, tired of suburban life, is buying Glory's End, a rundown plantation in Rockwell County, N.C. First, he must deal with a modern-day "ghost" - in cop parlance, someone just released from prison who decides to get revenge on the person who put him in jail. Then it's on to an even deadlier, more mysterious malefactor who's trying to kill him for reasons unknown. Cam's next door neighbors are Valeria Lee and her mother, Hester, who along with their lunatic relative, Maj. Courtney Woodruff Lee, dress and live in a strange antebellum past. The major likes to wear Confederate gray while spending his nights riding horseback around the countryside looking for Yankee spies. Cam's German shepherds, Frick, Frack and Kitty, help propel the action to an electrifying conclusion.

William C. Dietz

Drifter's Run

This is a fast paced, exciting science fiction thriller. The story continues the adventures of Pik Lando, master space smuggler. With a very tempting price on his head, Lando tries to avoid any run-ins with the law by taking a job on a space tug called Junk. The tug has an alcoholic captain with a 10 year old daughter and a cyborg engineer. It isn't long before Lando finds out that things aren't routine on the Junk.

Dr. James Dobson

Bringing Up Girls

Bringing Up Girls, is the long-awaited companion volume to best-selling author and parenting expert Dr. James Dobson’s extraordinarily successful book, Bringing Up Boys. Like Bringing Up Boys, Bringing Up Girls draws on extensive research and is written in Dr. Dobson’s trademark down-to-earth approach. It will equip parents to handle many of today’s most pressing issues affecting girls, including: female physiology, relationships with mother and father, cultural influences, bullies, buddies and best friends, and spiritual development. Dr. Dobson invested three years in this latest writing project, and based it on over 3500 pages of research.

Mike Doogan

Lost Angel

This is the first in the Nik Kane Alaska Mystery's. An excellent mystery, suspense novel that is hard to put down. When Faith, the teenage granddaughter of Moses Wright, the founder of the Christian commune of Rejoice, mysteriously vanishes, the elders of the Alaskan commune enlist troubled former cop Nik Kane--a man who lost his career and family while serving time for a crime he did not commit--to help find the missing girl. Once a decorated detective, now an ex-con, Nik Kane is desperate for a second chance. Nothing can give him back his career or family, but the search for Faith may restore his soul.

Skeleton Lake

The third Nik Kane book. Twenty years ago, Alaska was a different place - rougher, more violent. Danny Shirtleff was the kind of cop needed to keep the lid on Anchorage, never afraid to mix it up. His luck ran out on a muddy road next to Skeleton Lake. Two bullets in the back of the head took care of Danny, and landed fledgling detective Nik Kane with the first big case of his career. He never expected that it would take twenty years to untangle the threads that made up the dead police officer's life. Two decades on and Nik has been badly injured in pursuit of his latest case. Something about this experience starts him thinking about Danny Shirtleff - a mystery that has haunted him for years. Physically unable to take on a new assignment, Nik is determined to keep himself occupied by reexamining the evidence in this cold case. But cold cases can heat up. And Nik is about to get burned.

Alan Dean Foster

Light Years Beneath My Feet

This book is the second in the Taken series. Marcus Walker is a successful Chicago commodities broker that was abducted by aliens. He was hustled aboard an alien Vilenjji starship, part of a cargo of primitive creatures bound for the "civilized" part of the galaxy, where they'll be sold . . . as pets. Fortunately, there was another Earthling aboard, a scruffy dog named George who'd been speech-enhanced to increase his market value. Walker had spoken to plenty of dogs in his line of work but never to actual animals. He and George formed an immediate bond, giving new meaning to "man's best friend." The Light-Years Beneath My Feet finds Walker and George free at last, having managed, with some outside help, to outwit their kidnappers. But now they are a million billion miles from Earth. Walker glories in the wonders of his rescuers' hi-tech world and the thrill of being humankind's first galactic traveler-until he remembers the only place he wants to be is home. To take his mind off the depressing fact that he hasn't the slightest idea where home is, never mind how to get there, the erstwhile commodities broker becomes a chef. Walker never imagined that whipping up delicacies for demanding alien palates would lead to a possible way home-or that the possible way home would involve swapping his easy-living adopted planet for an all-out, age-old war many parsecs away. But hey, it was all for a good cause, he has George and their two fellow escapees for company, and what else was there to do, besides avoid Vilenjji? Plenty, as it turns out. . . .

Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen

Days of Infamy

This is the sequel to their book Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8th, 1941. Gingrich and Forstchen's now critically acclaimed approach, which they term active history, examines how a change in but one decision might have profoundly altered American history. In Pearl Harbor they explored how history might have been changed if Admiral Yamamoto had directly led the attack on that fateful day, instead of remaining in Japan. Days of Infamy starts minutes after the close of Pearl Harbor, as both sides react to the monumental events triggered by the presence of Admiral Yamamoto. In direct command of the six carriers of the attacking fleet, Yamamoto decides to launch a fateful third-wave attack on the island of Oahu, and then keeps his fleet in the area to hunt down the surviving American aircraft carriers, which by luck and fate were not anchored in the harbor on that day. In this story of the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the notorious gambler Yamamoto is pitted against the equally legendary American admiral Bill Halsey in a battle of wits, nerve, and skill. Days of Infamy recounts this alternative history from a multitude of viewpoints---from President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and the two great admirals, on down to American pilots flying antiquated aircraft, bravely facing the vastly superior Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft.

Terry Golway

Washington's General: Nathanael Greene And the Triumph of the American Revolution

A Quaker with a pronounced limp, Nathanael Greene surprised fellow patriots by rising quickly to become George Washingtons favorite soldier and heir apparent. After taking command of the failed Southern Army, Greene formulated an unorthodox guerrilla strategy to win by surprise attacks and hasty retreats, which cut the enemys supply lines until the outwitted British leaders grew tired of hunger and bloody sacrifices. His strategy of turning defeat into victory allowed the rebel army to gain momentum toward a final push, setting the stage for the victory at Yorktown. Terry Golways bold book, drawn from field documents, letters, diaries, and other sources, takes full account of the scope of Nathanael Greene's remarkable accomplishments, returning the forgotten patriot to his proper place in American history.

H. Terrell Griffin

Blood Island

This is the third Matt Royal novel. This time out, Matt is on a quest to find his ex-wife's stepdaughter, but the people he talks to begin to be murdered. He soon discovers that his life is in danger and he follows a lead to Key West, trying to find the stepdaughter and discover why he is now himself a target. Matt stumbles onto a religious cult on Blood Island that has plans to cause great harm to the world. He has to stop the coming conflagration while saving the young girl. Saving that girl is a tall order but, Matt Royal is up to the task and in his third novel, Griffin is in top form. According to Publishers Weekly, "Griffin's breezy first-person narration brings the likable Matt, with his killer reflexes and wry sense of humor, vividly to life."

John Grisham

Playing for Pizza

Rick Dockery was the third-string quarterback for the Cleveland Browns. In the AFC Championship game against Denver, to the surprise and dismay of virtually everyone, Rick actually got into the game. With a 17-point lead and just minutes to go, Rick provided what was arguably the worst single performance in the history of the NFL. Overnight, he became a national laughingstock and, of course, was immediately cut by the Browns and shunned by all other teams. But all Rick knows is football, and he insists that his agent, Arnie, find a team that needs him. Against enormous odds Arnie finally locates just such a team and informs Rick that, miraculously, he can in fact now be a starting quarterback. Great, says Rick—for which team? The mighty Panthers of Parma, Italy.

Gene Hackman and Daniel Lenihan

Escape From Andersonville

A good historical novel about the Civil War. In 1864 Union officer Nathan Parker is imprisoned in the nightmarish Andersonville prison camp along with 23 of the men he led in combat. Nathan later makes a daring escape and vows to come back and get his men out. He tries to get the Union leaders to send troops to get the men by the they won't have anything to do with it. So, he organizes a group of cutthroats, soldiers and castoffs and takes matters in to his own hands. All in all it is a good story with action throughout.

David Hagberg

By Dawn's Early Light

On the Bay of Bengal a civilian research vessel witnesses a submarine fire a laser into the sky. Before they can process what they see, the sub blasts them out of the water and captures the lone survivor. Immediately, one of the United States spy satellites becomes inoperative, and seemingly disappears. With the United States blind, Pakistan plans to announce their presence as a nuclear threat with an attack on India that would leave millions dead. The only witnesses to the plan, and the only ones to know that the bomb is small enough to be dropped from an aircraft, are a CIA insertion team, headed by the President's own brother, former Navy SEAL lieutenant Scott Hanson. Their knowledge may prevent a nuclear holocaust, but they've been captured and tortured. Thrust into the action is Commander Frank Dillon, Jr., commanding officer on the American nuclear sub Seawolf, together with a team of SEALs. Their mission is to get them back safely. But with the world on the brink of war, getting out may be the greatest challenge of all.

Mike Harrison

All Shook Up

This hard-edged, energetic mystery features Eddie Dancer—Canada's newest and toughest private eye. Two years as a city cop have convinced Eddie he is better off working for himself as a private investigator. When he is hired to track down a tough, professional bank robber, Eddie has no idea he is about to pry the lid off a very nasty can of worms. When he runs up against a pair of disgraced ex-bikers, he uncovers a macabre connection between the ex-bikers and the "fate worse than death" that has befallen many of the city's hookers—a fate that leaves them, irreversibly, in a vegetative state. Eddie learns that a man who is already in prison has carried out the bank robbery and he wonders how someone can be in two different places at once. With the help of his friend, Danny Many Guns, Eddie uncovers evidence of a major conspiracy stretching from the city's back streets and tattoo parlors to the very top of the prison system food chain. Will Danny Many Guns save his friend and partner from the "fate worse than death," or will the bad guys get their revenge on the man who has exposed them?

Ruby Tuesday

Paul Menzies is an out–of–shape, middle–aged advertising executive, who arrives at work one morning to discover he’s lost his job. Downsized. That evening, he stops by a bank machine to check his finances. Ahead of him, a scruffy young couple is arguing about the state of their own finances. When the muscular husband, Victor Shriver, loses his temper and smacks his wife hard, Paul steps in and hauls the young thug backwards across the lobby. In the ensuing brawl, Shriver puts Paul in hospital for nearly a week. Despite the severity of his injuries, the cops have little choice but to lay charges against Paul for assault. Victor Shriver has found himself a sharp little lawyer, and between them they smell money, asking for $50,000. Instead Paul offers to fight Victor, mano a mano, in a boxing ring. Three rounds. If Shriver wins, Paul will pay him and the assault charges will be dropped. If Paul wins, no money changes hands and the assault charges will still be dropped. When she realizes there’s nothing she can do to dissuade her husband, Paul’s feisty wife, Valerie Menzies, hires Eddie Dancer to stop the fight. But it’s too little, too late and when the heat of the media spotlight focuses on the “mismatched fight of the year,” even Eddie realizes he’s beaten. As the world’s press and the TV networks pour into town for the main event, Eddie finds himself reliving some unresolved issues of spousal abuse from his own past. And once that lid is off, there’s no way Eddie can ever get it back on again.

Wild Thing

When Eddie Dancer receives an early morning call for help, he catches the next plane to Britain. His friend, Dr. Peter Maurice, a renowned psychologist on a UK book tour with his wife Sylvia, has been accused of multiple, brutal murders and is about to be arrested. Eddie learns that the deadly intrigue goes further back than the present time – to a two-hundred-year-old manuscript, written by Franz Anton Mesmer, and recently purchased by Dr. Maurice. The manuscript, written in Old Italian, appears to be a catalyst that sparks killing sprees, as history shows that Mesmer’s great-great-granddaughter, who smuggled the manuscript out of East Germany, became the first of many women to die horribly at the hands of a demented serial killer. But what’s the connection? Eddie arranges to have the manuscript translated, but when he goes to collect it, he discovers the translator dead, her head brutally crushed by a killer who specializes in breaking bones very slowly. Eddie’s investigation unearths gruesome information about England’s notorious Newgate Prison, once frequented by Mesmer but long since burned to the ground. The paparazzi are all over Eddie and Dr. Maurice’s wife as Eddie works to disprove Scotland Yard’s claim that Dr. Maurice is a monster. Eddie is determined to help the good Doctor and prove the police wrong. But are they?

Joseph Heywood

Running Dark

This is the fourth book in the Woods Cop Mysteries. For years the Michigan Department of Natural Resources engaged in a rough and tumble contest with fish poachers operating from the Garden Peninsula in Delta County. Equipment got smashed, people got hurt, and it nearly turned into lethal shooting war. Grady Service, a new CO, was right in the thick of it. Lansing had it's own agenda back then and officers were left on their own and to their own devices to deal with the trouble.

Jack Higgins

The Khufra Run

Jack Nelson came out of 'Nam with two things: phenomenal flying skills and a serious problem taking orders from almost anyone. Now he makes an almost legal living peddling his talents to the highest bidder. When he rescues a young beauty from attack on a quiet night in Ibiza, he ends up with an opportunity to pull off the heist of a lifetime. The freelance pilot is hurled into a perilous treasure hunt. There are millions in sunken treasure sunken in the Khufra marshes. All he has to do to collect the loot is live through it. Waiting for him are the ruthless Colonel Taleb and his murderous Husa horsemen.

Steve Hockensmith

The Black Dove

This is the third book by Hockensmith that I've read. It is good, but I didn't like it as much as the other two. In the summer of 1893, Gustav "Old Red" Amlingmeyer and his brother Otto (a.k.a. "Big Red") find themselves down and out in San Francisco. Though cowpokes by training, the brothers are devotees of the late, great Sherlock Holmes and his trademark method of deducifying. But when they set out to land jobs as professional detectives, they land themselves in hot water, instead. First their friend Dr. Chan mysteriously takes a potshot at them, fatally wounding Big Red's new hat. Then a secretive young woman from their past pops up and convinces them that Chan's in trouble -- and they're just the men to get him out of it. Unfortunately, they're too late: By the time they track Chan down again, he's dead. The police call it a suicide. Old Red calls that a lie. When he and his brother set out to prove it, they put themselves on a collision course with shady S.F.P.D. cops, brutal Barbary Coast hoodlums and the deadly Chinatown tongs. Before long, all sides are in a race to uncover the secret that could rock the city. And their only clue to what's actually going on is the enigmatic, exotic and extremely difficult to find Black Dove.

The Crack in the Lens

I didn't like his third book, Black Dove, but in this book Hockensmith redeems himself. It's late 1893, and things finally seem to be going right for Otto "Big Red" Amlingmeyer and his brother Gustav (a.k.a. "Old Red"). After years of hard knocks, Big Red's started selling stories about their adventures as would-be detectives following in the footsteps of their hero: Sherlock Holmes. Which means for once Big Red and Old Red have a bit of money in their pockets and time on their hands. So why is Old Red so edgy? Because he's got unfinished business, that's why. And he reckons now's the time to finish it. Five years before, when Old Red was a cowhand in San Marcos, Texas, he had a sweetheart -- a "soiled dove" at the local house of ill repute. But before they could run off together and get married, the girl was brutally murdered, and the local law swept the case under the rug. Now, Old Red hopes he's got the "deducifyin'" know-how to find out what really happened and bring the killer to justice. But even the great Sherlock Holmes never had to face anything like this. Big Red and Old Red soon find themselves in the middle of a riot at the local cathouse, on the wrong end of a lynching party and forced to commit the greatest crime a man can in the state of Texas : steal horses. Eventually, however, they uncover a bizarre link to one of the world's most infamous madmen -- just as Old Red seems to be coming apart under the strain of his quest for vengeance. It's enough to make his brother wonder: Will Old Red crack the case...or crack up himself?

Holmes on the Range

I liked "On the Wrong Track" so much I just had to read this book and I've already atarted a third one. 1893 is a tough year in Montana, and any job is a good job. When Big Red and Old Red Amlingmeyer sign on as ranch hands at the secretive Bar-VR cattle spread, they're not expecting much more than hard work, bad pay, and a comfortable campfire around which they can enjoy their favorite pastime: scouring Harper's Weekly for stories about the famous Sherlock Holmes. When the boys come across a dead body that looks a whole lot like the leftovers of an unfortunate encounter with a cattle stampede, Old Red sees the perfect opportunity to employ his Holmes-inspired deducifyin' skills. Putting his ranch work squarely on the back burner, he sets out to solve the case. Big Red, like it or not (and mostly he does not), is along for the wild ride in this clever, compelling, and completely one-of-a-kind mystery novel.

On The Wrong Track

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. Funny and filled with action. He has written 3 other books with the same characters and I've already started one. It may be 1893 and the modern world may be in full swing, but cowboy Gustav "Old Red" Amlingmeyer is an old-fashioned kind of guy: He prefers a long trail ride even when a train could get him where he's going in one-tenth the time. His brother Otto ("Big Red"), on the other hand, wouldn't mind climbing down from his horse and onto a train once in a while if it'll give his saddle-sore rear end a rest. So when it's Old Red who insists they sign on to protect the luxurious Pacific Express, despite a generations-old Amlingmeyer family distrust of the farm-stealin', cattle-killin', money-grubbin' railroads, Big Red is flummoxed. But Old Red, tired of the cowpoke life, wants to take a stab at professional "detectifying," just like his hero, Sherlock Holmes, and guarding jobs for the railroad are the only ones on offer. So it is that Big Red and Old Red find themselves trapped on a thousand tons of steam-driven steel, summiting the Sierras en route to San Francisco with a crafty gang of outlaws somewhere around the next bend, a baggage car jam-packed with deadly secrets, and a vicious killer hidden somewhere among the colorful passengers....

Tony Horwitz

A Voyage Long and Strange

This is an outstanding non-fiction book. Horwitz decides to uncover the neglected story of America's founding by Europeans - the period prior to the arrival of the Mayflower. He embarks on an epic quest of his own - trekking in search of places settled and routes explored by the Vikings, Columbus, the conquistadors and the early English. Horwitz does an excellent job of interweaving little know history with his recent findings. This is a good read that makes history fun.

Craig Johnson

Another Man's Moccasins

When the body of a young Vietnamese woman is found alongside the interstate in Absaroka County, Wyoming, Sherriff Walt Longmire is determined to discover the identity of the victim and is forced to confront the horrible similarities of this murder to that of his first homicide investigation as a marine in Vietnam. To complicate matters, Virgil White Buffalo, a homeless Crow Indian, is found living in a nearby culvert and in possession of the young woman's purse. There are only two problems with what appears to be an open-and-shut case. One, the sheriff doesn't think Virgil White Buffalo-a Vietnam vet with a troubling past-is a murderer. And two, the photo that is found in the woman's purse looks hauntingly familiar to Walt.

Death Without Company

When Mari Baroja is found poisoned at the Durant Home for Assisted Living, Sheriff Walt Longmire is drawn into an investigation of her death that proves to be as dramatic as her life. Her connections to the Basque community, the lucrative coal-bed methane industry, and the personal life of the previous sheriff, Lucian Connally, lead to a complex web of half truths and assumed allegiances. As the specter of Mari's abusive husband arises, Sheriff Longmire, aided by his friend Henry Standing Bear, Deputy Victoria Moretti, and newcomer Santiago Saizarbitoria, must connect the past to the present to find the killer among them. Death Without Company is a riveting tale of the unspeakable viciousness that can lurk in the most beautiful and unlikely of places.

Junkyard Dogs

A missing thumb and dead developers are only the beginning for Sheriff Walt Longmire. It's a volatile new economy in Durant, Wyoming, where the owners of a multi-million dollar development of ranchettes want to get rid of the adjacent junk-yard. When a severed thumb is discovered in the yard, conflicts erupt, and Walt Longmire, his trusty companion Dog, life-long friend Henry Standing Bear, and deputies Santiago Saizarbitoria and Victoria Moretti find themselves in a small town that feels more and more like a high plains pressure cooker. The sixth book in the series is filled with Johnson's signature blend of wisecracks, Western justice, and page-turning plot twists, as the beloved sheriff finds himself star-deep in the darker aspects of human nature, in a story of love, laughs, death, and derelict automobiles

Kindness Goes Unpunished

Walt Longmire has been sheriff of Wyoming's Absaroka County for almost a quarter of a century and has meted out justice with charm and a high-powered sense of humor, but when Walt tags along with good friend Henry Standing Bear on a trip to Philadelphia, he's in for a shock. When a vicious attack on his daughter Cady leaves her near death, Walt discovers that she has unwittingly become embroiled in a deadly political cover-up. With Henry, Deputy Victoria Moretti, the entire Moretti clan of Philadelphia police officers, and Dog as backup, Sheriff Longmire intends to introduce a little western justice from his saddlebag of tricks to the City of Brotherly Love, where no act of kindness goes unpunished.

The Cold Dish

The body of a young man is found in Absaroka County, Wyoming. It is possible that Cody Pritchard is the victim of a hunting accident, or is he? After all, he was one of the four boys who lured Melissa Real Bird, a Cheyenne girl with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, into a basement and raped her. Cody and his friends received what amounted to suspended sentences. Is someone seeking revenge? Will the specter of race relations and lingering retribution claim more lives? Or will the only thing that stands between them and a Sharps .45-70 buffalo rifle be Sheriff Walt Longmire? On the autumnal side of twenty-four years as sheriff of Absaroka County, which is located at the base of the Big Horn Mountains and next to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Walt is looking for a quiet period to finish out his tenure but instead finds himself embroiled in the most volatile and challenging case of his career. With lifelong friend Henry Standing Bear, Deputy Victoria Morretti, and a cast of characters tragic and humorous enough to fill in the vast emptiness of the high plains, Walt Longmire attempts to see that revenge, a dish best served cold, is never served at all.

The Dark Horse

Wade Barsad, a man with a dubious past and a gift for making enemies, burned his wife Mary's horses in their barn; in retribution, she shot him in the head six times. But Longmire doesn't believe Mary's confession. Leaving behind the demands of his upcoming re-election campaign, Walt unpins his star to go undercover and discovers that everyone-including a beautiful Guatemalan bartender and a rancher with a taste for liquor-had a reason for wanting Wade dead.

William W. Johnstone

The First Mountain Man: Preacher

This is one of the books in the First Mountain Man Series. It was OK, but not great. Art leaves his family at the age of 12 to begin a journey from Ohio westward. Along the way he has to learn to deal with bad men, war with England, becoming a slave, getting his freedom and surviving in the mountains. Several years later and after spending two years in the mountains, he comes back down with new skills and a new future.

Landon Y. Jones

William Clark and the Shaping of the West

Famous for his exploits as part of the fabled Lewis and Clark expedition, William Clark (1770-1838) spent the better part of his life playing a key role in America's expansion into the territory he had eagerly scouted. Using newly available archival materials, Jones provides a riveting portrait of the lawlessness and chaos of postrevolutionary life on the American frontier as well as a fast-paced story of Clark's dramatic life. Clark's life was spent fighting in America's fifty-year running war with the Indians (and their European allies) over the Western borderlands. The struggle began with his famed brother George Roger's western campaigns during the American Revolution, continued through the vicious battles of the War of 1812, and ended with the Black Hawk War in the 1830s. In vividly depicting Clark's life, Jones memorably captures not only the dark and bloody ground of America's early West, but also the qualities of character and courage that made him an unequalled leader in America's grander enterprise: the shaping of the West. No one played a larger part in that accomplishment than William Clark.

Alex Kershaw

The Bedford Boys

June 6, 1944: Nineteen boys from Bedford, Virginia--population just 3,000 in 1944--died in the first bloody minutes of D-Day. They were part of Company A of the 116th Regiment of the 29th Division, and the first wave of American soldiers to hit the beaches in Normandy. Later in the campaign, three more boys from this small Virginia town died of gunshot wounds. Twenty-two sons of Bedford lost--it is a story one cannot easily forget and one that the families of Bedford will never forget. The Bedford Boys is the true and intimate story of these men and the friends and families they left behind.Based on extensive interviews with survivors and relatives, as well as diaries and letters, Kershaw's book focuses on several remarkable individuals and families to tell one of the most poignant stories of World War II--the story of one small American town that went to war and died on Omaha Beach.

Michael Korda

With Wings Like Eagles

Michael Korda's brilliant work of history takes the reader back to the summer of 1940, when fewer than three thousand young fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force—often no more than nine hundred on any given day—stood between Hitler and the victory that seemed almost within his grasp. A very informative book with many details about the people involved, the tactics and the little things that changed history. It sets the stage for the rest of the war.

John Lescroart

The Hunt Club

A federal judge is murdered, found shot to death in his home—together with the body of his mistress. The crime grips San Francisco. To homicide inspector Devin Juhle, it looks at first like a simple case of a wife's jealousy and rage. But Juhle's investigation reveals that the judge had powerful enemies . . . some of whom may have been willing to kill to prevent him from meddling in their affairs. Meanwhile, private investigator Wyatt Hunt, Juhle's best friend, finds himself smitten with the beautiful and enigmatic Andrea Parisi. A lawyer who recently has become a celebrity as a commentator on Trial TV, Andrea has star power in spades, and seems bound for a national anchor job in New York City. Until Juhle discovers that Andrea, too, had a connection to the judge, along with a client that had everything to gain from the judge's death. And then she suddenly disappears. . . .

Andro Linklater

Measuring America

Measuring America is the fascinating, provocative, and eye-opening story of why America has ended up with its unique system of weights and measures—the American Customary System, unlike any other in the world—and how this has profoundly shaped our country and culture. In the process, Measuring America reveals the colossal power contained inside the acres and miles, ounces and pounds, that we use every day without ever realizing their significance. The most urgent problem facing the newly independent United States was how to pay for the war that won the country its freedom; America’s debt was enormous. Its greatest asset was the land west of the Ohio River, but for this huge territory to be sold, it had first to be surveyed—that is, measured out and mapped. And before that could be done, a uniform set of measurements had to be chosen for the new republic.

Archer Mayor

The Price of Malice

Wayne Castine is found savagely stabbed to death, leaving the crime scene covered in blood. Castine, a suspected child predator, had ties to an extended local family in Brattleboro, Vermont, including possible liaisons with both the mother and her 12 year old daughter. Any member of this clan had the opportunity, not to mention a motive, to commit murder. However, as Joe Gunther's Vermont Bureau of Investigation team tries to unravel the case's complexities, Joe himself is distracted by a more personal matter - he has learned that his girlfriend Lyn Silva's fisherman father and brother, believed lost at sea off the Maine coast years ago, might have been murdered instead. While Gunther doesn't have enough information to act officially, Lyn has no such constraints; she returns home to investigate on her own. Periodically, therefore - irritating both colleagues and bosses - Joe goes AWOL to help Lyn in Maine. It's a good thing, too, for as more evidence emerges, it appears Lyn's father and brother may not have been simply innocent victims, but possibly involved with a gang of vicious smugglers - men who wouldn't hesitate to kill Lyn if she keeps pushing. Torn between his conscience and his heart, a murder investigation and a personal search for the truth, Joe Gunther finds that betrayal and loyalty are often a matter of viewpoint.

Jack McDevitt

Echo

Eccentric Sunset Tuttle spent his life searching in vain for forms of alien life. Thirty years after his death, a stone tablet inscribed with cryptic, indecipherable symbols is found in the possession of Tuttle's onetime lover, and antiquities dealer Alex Benedict is anxious to discover what secret the tablet holds. It could be proof that Tuttle had found what he was looking for. To find out, Benedict and his assistant embark on their own voyage of discovery-one that will lead them directly into the path of a very determined assassin who doesn't want those secrets revealed.

The Devil's Eye

In The Devil's Eye, Alex receives a recorded call for help from Vicki Greene, a renowned writer of horror tales. "God help me, Mr. Benedict," she says, in a trembling voice, "they're all dead." Alex is on vacation. Before he can get to her, she has had a mind wipe. 'To relieve intense mental anguish,' says her doctor. She has left no explanation. But she's deposited a substantial sum in Alex's account. There's no indication that anything unusual had happened to her recently. And no one seems to be dead. She had, several weeks earlier, returned from a vacation to Salud Afar, the most distant human world, located 30,000 light-years outside the galaxy. It has a sun, of course. And a moon. And there is a handful of planets. The only other light in the sky is a distant star. Alex and his partner, Chase Kolpath, head for that distant world. But there's no indication of unusual events there, either. At least, not at first. Vicki, while there, entertained herself by visiting various sites thought to be haunted, a ghostly aircraft at one, an undead super soldier at another, a haunted forest at a third. Eventually they begin to put things together, while also discovering that someone wants to scare them off. Or, barring that, do what's necessary to keep a horrific secret.

Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and Joe Galloway

We Are Soldiers Still

In their stunning follow-up to the classic bestseller We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young, Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and Joe Galloway return to Vietnam and reflect on how the war changed them, their men, their enemies, and both countries-often with surprising results.

James L. Nelson

George Washington's Great Gamble

In the opening months of 1781, General George Washington feared his army would fail to survive another campaign season. The spring and summer only served to reinforce his despair, but in late summer the changing circumstances of war presented a once-in-a-war opportunity for a French armada to hold off the mighty British navy while his own troops with French reinforcements drove Lord Cornwallis's forces to the Chesapeake. The Battle of the Capes would prove the only time the French ever fought the Royal Navy to a draw, and for the British army it was a catastrophe. Cornwallis confidently retreated to Yorktown, expecting to be evacuated by a British fleet that never arrived. In the end he had no choice but to surrender. Although the war sputtered on another two years, its outcome was never in doubt after Yorktown.

Robert B. Parker

Split Image

The body in the trunk was just the beginning. Turns out the stiff was a foot soldier for local tough guy Reggie Galen, now enjoying a comfortable "retirement" with his beautiful wife, Rebecca, in the nicest part of Paradise. Living next door are Knocko Moynihan and his wife, Robbie, who also happens to be Rebecca's twin. But what initially appears to be a low-level mob hit takes on new meaning when a high-ranking crime figure is found dead on Paradise Beach. Stressed by the case, his failed relationship with his ex-wife, and his ongoing battle with the bottle, Jesse needs something to keep him from spinning out of control. When private investigator Sunny Randall comes into town on a case, she asks for Jesse's help. As their professional and personal relationships become intertwined, both Jesse and Sunny realize that they have much in common with both their victims and their suspects—and with each other.

Resolution

Friends Everett Hitch and Virgil Cole are back together. Parker's first book with them was Appaloosa. This book is a sequel to the first but you don't have to read Appaloosa to enjoy it. Hitch has moved on to Appaloosa and gets a job as a bouncer in the saloon. His tool of choice is his eight-gauge shotgun. Things heat up as the saloons owner, Amos Wolfson, has a goal of taking over the land from the ranchers, the local sawmill and copper mine. Hitch's old friend Virgil Cole soon arrives to help. Hitch and Cole decide they would rather protect the ranchers. Wolfson hires 20 men to help him. In a place where law and order doesn't exist, Hitch and Cole make there own guided by their sense of duty, honor and friendship.

Blue-Eyed Devil

Cole and Hitch are no longer the law in Appaloosa. The new chief is Amos Callico: a tall, fat man in a derby hat, wearing a star on his vest and a big pearl-handled Colt inside his coat. An ambitious man with his eye on the governorship - and perhaps the presidency - he wants Cole and Hitch on his side. But they can't be bought, which upsets him mightily. When Callico begins shaking down local merchants for protection money, those who don't want to play along seek the help of Cole and Hitch. But the guns for hire are thorns in the side of the power-hungry chief. When they are forced to fire on the trigger-happy son of a politically connected landowner, Callico sees his dream begin to crumble. There will be a showdown—but who'll be left standing?

Brimstone

When we last saw Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, they had just put things to right in the rough-and-tumble Old West town of Resolution. It's now a year later, and Virgil has only one thing on his mind: Allie French, the woman who stole his heart from their days in Appaloosa. Even though Allie ran off with another man, Virgil is determined to find her, his deputy and partner Everett Hitch at his side. Making their way across New Mexico and Texas, the pair finally discover Allie in a small-town brothel. Her spirit crushed, Allie joins Everett and Virgil as they head north to start over in Brimstone. But things are not the same between Virgil and Allie; too much has happened, and Virgil can't face what Allie did to survive the year they were apart. Vowing to change, Allie thinks she has found redemption through the local church and its sanctimonious leader, Brother Percival. Given their reputations as guns for hire, Everett and Virgil are able to secure positions as the town's deputies. But Brother Percival stirs up trouble at the local saloons, and as the violence escalates into murder, the two struggle to keep the peace.

Nathaniel Philbrick

The Last Stand

Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In his tightly structured narrative, Nathaniel Philbrick brilliantly sketches the two larger-than-life antagonists: Sitting Bull, whose charisma and political savvy earned him the position of leader of the Plains Indians, and George Armstrong Custer, one of the Union’s greatest cavalry officers and a man with a reputation for fearless and often reckless courage. Philbrick reminds readers that the Battle of the Little Bighorn was also, even in victory, the last stand for the Sioux and Cheyenne Indian nations. Increasingly outraged by the government’s Indian policies, the Plains tribes allied themselves and held their ground in southern Montana. Within a few years of Little Bighorn, however, all the major tribal leaders would be confined to Indian reservations.

Dudley Pope

Ramage and the Drumbeat

Book 2 in the series. This is the second book in the Ramage series. It is just as good as the first and I plan on reading more. Lieutenant Lord Ramage is placed in command of His Majesty's ship KATHLEEN. The cutter, is ordered to transport the Marchessa di Volterri to Gilbraltar. On the way Lt. Ramage captures a dismasted Spanish frigate, gets the KATHLEEN captured in turn, becomes a spy in Cadiz, then, escaping, is restored to command of the recaptured KATHLEEN, and helps Captain Nelson win the battle of Cape St. Vincent.

Ramage and the Freebooters

Book 3 in the series. Lieutenant Lord Ramage is summoned to the Admiralty, where the First Lord gives him command of the 10-gun brig Triton, as well as three sealed despatches addressed to the admirals off Brest and Cadiz, and in the Caribbean. Ramage, who has sympathy with some of the mutineer's complaints, must overcome a crew that has joined the Spithead Mutiny to deliver the dispatches to the Caribbean. Failure to deliver the dispatches means he will be a convenient scapegoat for the Admiralty. Once on station, he is given the task of finding why coastal f reighters are disappearing as they sail from Grenada -- a puzzle whose solution has eluded two post captains. This, is an exciting story which captures all the mystery and adventure of the Caribbean in Nelson's day.

Ramage

Book 1 in the series. Good reading similar to the Hornblower series. Lord Ramage is the third lieutenant on His Majesty's ship Sibella, but assumes command when the Captain, and the First and Second Lieutenants are killed by fire from a French ship. The French ship had fatally crippled the Sibella and had killed over half of her crew. As the new Captain, Ramage decides to abandon the sinking ship. He leaves the injured on the deck to be taken prisoner by the French and hopefully treated by their surgeon. Before he abandons the ship, Ramage retrieves some documents and the late Captain's last orders. The remaining crew then loads into the four lifeboats and rows away. As they are rowing away, the crew of the French ship set the Sibella on fire after taking the injured off. After a few minutes of getting his thoughts together, Ramage opens the last orders of the late Captain of the Sibella. The orders read that the Sibella was on a reconnaissance missions to extricate the Marchessa di Volterri along with five other nobles including the Marchessa's two cousins. Ramage decides to go through with the reconnaissance mission.Ramage eventually rescues the Marchessa and one of her cousins. The cousins' brother accuses Ramage of cowardice. During their time together, the Marchessa and Ramage develop a complicated relationship. After the Marchessa is returned, Ramage is sent to trial for his loss of the Sibella and also to the accusation of cowardice. Ramage's trial is interrupted though and he is called on to rescue an English crew whose ship had run aground. Ramage saves the stranded crew and returns to the Marchessa, but is ordered to return to sea.

Douglas Preston

Impact

Wyman Ford is tapped for a secret expedition to Cambodia... to locate the source of strangely beautiful gemstones that do not appear to be of this world. While he searches for the origin of these dangerous jewels, a young woman in Maine, Abbey, borrows her father's boat to search the outer islands for the meteorite that lit up the sky in her small town. Meanwhile, a scientist at the National Propulsion Facility discovers an inexplicable source of gamma rays in the outer Solar System. He is found decapitated, the data missing. Ford soon realizes the jewel mine he seeks is much more than it seems. and it is strangely connected to the events happening on the other side of the world. High resolution images from NASA soon reveal an unnatural feature hidden in the depths of Voltaire Crater on Deimos, one of Mars' moons. Sticking up from the structure is the unmistakable outline of a gun. It was built to monitor the solar system and destroy any intelligent life powerful enough to challenge it - but built by whom? The meteorite was actually a shot at the earth and a few days later there is one at the moon. Will Ford and Abbey be able to stop the destruction of the earth?

Mike Resnick

Starship: Pirate

The date is 1967 of the Galactic Era, almost three thousand years from now. The Republic, created by the human race but not yet dominated by it, is in the midst of an all-out war with the Teroni Federation. After his latest exploit saved millions of lives but embarrassed his superiors, Captain Wilson Cole, a man with a reputation for exceeding orders but getting results, found himself the victim of the media feeding frenzy, a political scapegoat despite years of dedicated military service. Faced with a court martial, he was rescued by the loyal crew of his ship, the Theodore Roosevelt. Now branded mutineers, the crew of the Teddy R. has quit the Republic, never to return. Seeking to find a new life for themselves, Wilson Cole and comrades remake the Teddy R. as a pirate ship and set sail for the lawless Inner Frontier. Here, powerful warlords, cut-throat pirates, and struggling colonies compete for survival in a game where you rarely get a second chance to learn the rules. But military discipline is poor preparation for a life of pillaging and plundering, and Cole's principles naturally limit his targets. Seeking an education on the nature of piracy, Cole hunts more knowledgeable players. Enter the beautiful but deadly Valkyrie, Val for short, and the enigmatic alien fence known as David Copperfield. But hanging over everything is the fearsome alien pirate--the Hammerhead Shark.

David L. Robbins

The End of War

In the final months of the war in Europe, the last act of a five-year conflagration is about to be played out. Allied generals move their war-hardened armies around the mortally wounded Nazi military machine. But strategies are being formed on a greater scale than even generals can imagine. While Churchill fumes helplessly, Roosevelt makes crucial decisions that will cede Berlin to Stalin and the Russians. The stakes are no less critical for ordinary men and women, fighting to live another day. On the ground are young Russian soldiers driven by vengeance into the teeth of the still-deadly Nazi army; American forces push forward under the political motives of a canny commander in chief; and the British, aloof, at odds with their Yankee counterparts, see in these last fateful moves a devastating betrayal by Washington and Moscow. The End of War vividly animates the giants who shaped history and breathes life into the heartbreaking struggles of those who merely lived it. From the chaos of the trenches on the eastern front, to the desperation of a single Jewish man hidden in a Berlin basement by a terrified mother and daughter, to the burning ambition of an American photojournalist determined to capture on film the defining moment of the war, Robbins ushers us into the sweep of history and the drama of the human face of war.

S. Thomas Russell

Under Enemy Colors

A sweeping novel of maritime mutiny set against the backdrop of the French Revolution that evokes such masters as Patrick O'Brian and Bernard Cornwell. At the time of the French Revolution, one of Britain's most skillful naval officers, Charles Saunders Hayden, is a young lieutenant, the son of an English father and a French mother. His abilities and his loyalty to the king of England are beyond dispute, yet his career seems doomed by his "mixed" heritage and lack of political connections. Consequently, Hayden is assigned to an aging frigate, the Themis, under the command of Captain Josiah Hart, a man known as "Faint Hart" throughout the service. As the Themis takes to sea to harass the enemy, the disaffection of the crew begins to boil over into acts of violence, and the lieutenant finds himself caught between his superior and a crew pushed toward mutiny. A revolution at sea ensues, and Hayden is wrenchingly torn between honor and duty, as the magnificent Royal Navy engages the French in a centuries-old struggle for power. This is a novel that satisfies on all levels, and will be loved by a wide range of readers: Patrick O'Brian's adoring literary following, as well as readers who love Bernard Cornwell, Steven Pressfield, and Jeff Shaara. Its scenes of maritime warfare match, and even surpass, O'Brian's for majesty and drama.

John Sandford

Rough Country

Another great book by John Sandford with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers. Virgil's always been known for having a somewhat active, er, social life, but he's probably not going to be getting too many opportunities for that during his new case. While competing in a fishing tournament in a remote area of northern Minnesota, he gets a call from Lucas Davenport to investigate a murder at a nearby resort, where a woman has been shot while kayaking. The resort is for women only, a place to relax, get fit, recover from plastic surgery, commune with nature, and while it didn't start out to be a place mostly for those with Sapphic inclinations, that's pretty much what it is today. Which makes things all the more complicated for Virgil, because as he begins investigating, he finds a web of connections between the people at the resort, the victim, and some local women, notably a talented country singer, and the more he digs, the move he discovers the arrows of suspicion that point in many directions, encompassing a multitude of motivations: jealousy, blackmail, greed, anger, fear. And then he discovers that this is not the first murder, that there was a second, seemingly unrelated one, the year before. And that there's about to be a third, definitely related one, any time now. And as for the fourth... well, Virgil better hope he can catch the killer before that happens.

Dark of the Moon

I liked this book. Virgil Flowers is an interesting main character. Virgil Flowers - tall, lean, late thirties, three times divorced, hair way too long for a cop's - had kicked around a while before joining the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. First it was the army and the military police, then the police in St. Paul, and finally Lucas Davenport had brought him into the BCA, promising him, "We'll only give you the hard stuff." He'd been doing the hard stuff for three years now - but never anything like this. In the small town of Bluestem, where everybody knows everybody, a house way up on a ridge explodes into flames, its owner, a man named Judd, trapped inside. There is a lot of reason to hate him, Flowers discovers. Years ago, Judd had perpetrated a scam that'd driven a lot of local farmers out of business, even to suicide. There are also rumors swirling around: of some very dicey activities with other men's wives; of involvement with some nutcase religious guy; of an out-of-wedlock daughter. In fact, Flowers concludes, you'd probably have to dig around to find a person who didn't despise him. And that wasn't even the reason Flowers had come to Bluestem. Three weeks before, there'd been another murder - two, in fact - a doctor and his wife, the doctor found propped up in his backyard, both eyes shot out. There hadn't been a murder in Bluestem in years - and now, suddenly, three. Flowers knows two things: This wasn't a coincidence, and this had to be personal. But just how personal is something even he doesn't realize, and may not find out until too late. Because the next victim... may be himself.

Heat Lightning

Virgil Flowers is a Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator. John Sandford's first book with him is Dark of the Moon which I read earlier. Flowers is only in his late thirties, but he's been around the block a few times, and he doesn't think much can surprise him anymore. He's wrong. It's a hot, humid summer night in Minnesota, and Flowers is in bed with one of his ex-wives (the second one, if you're keeping count), when the phone rings. It's Lucas Davenport. There's a body in Stillwater - two shots to the head, found near a veteran's memorial. And the victim has a lemon in his mouth. Exactly like the body they found last week. The more Flowers works the murders, the more convinced he is that someone's keeping a list, and that the list could have a lot more names on it. If he could only find out what connects them all . . . and then he does, and he's almost sorry he did. Because if it's true, then this whole thing leads down a lot more trails than he thought - and every one of them is booby-trapped. I have enjoyed both books by Sandford with Virgil Flowers and look forward to his next book Rough Country.

Jeff Shaara

Gone For Soldiers

A novel about the Mexican-American War of 1847. Shaara paints a respectable if uneven group portrait of the men who fought south of the border. Gen. Winfield Scott--accompanied by future Confederacy leaders Robert E. Lee, George Pickett and Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson, and soon-to-be Union Army Gen. Ulysses S. Grant--lands at the port of Vera Cruz, intent on piercing straight through to the heart of Mexico and defeating General Santa Anna. The action begins with the Battle of Vera Cruz and follows Scott and his army as they march toward Mexico City, including the Battle of Cerro Gordo and culminating in the Battle of Chapultepec and the fall of Mexico City.

No Less Than Victory

An excellent conclusion to Jeff Shaara's World War II trilogy. After the success of the Normandy invasion, the allied commanders are buoyantly confident that the war in Europe will be over in a matter of weeks, that Hitler and his battered army have no other option besides surrender. But despite the advice from his best military minds, Hitler will hear no talk of defeat. In mid-December, 1944, the Germans launch a desperate and ruthless counteroffensive in the Ardennes Forest, utterly surprising the unprepared Americans who stand in his way. Through the frigid snows of the mountainous terrain, German tanks and infantry struggle to realize Hitler's goal, to divide the Allied armies, and capture the vital port at Antwerp. The attack succeeds in opening up a wide gap in the American lines, and for days, chaos reigns in the Allied command. The campaign becomes known as the Battle of the Bulge, a last gasp by Hitler's forces that becomes a horrific slugging match, some of the most brutal fighting of the war. As American commanders respond to the stunning challenge, the Germans' spear is finally blunted, ending Hitler's last hope for victory. Though some in the Nazi inner circle continue the fight to preserve Germany's future, the Fuhrer makes it clear he is fighting to the end. He will spare nothing, not even German lives, to preserve his twisted vision of a "Thousand Year Reich." In May, 1945, the German army collapses, and with Russian troops closing in, Hitler commits suicide. As the Americans sweep through German countryside, they unexpectedly encounter the worst of Hitler's crimes, the concentration camps, young GIs absorbing firsthand the horrors of the Holocaust.

The Rising Tide

If you want to find out about World War II, I recommend these books. Shaara writes in a way that makes it fun to learn. They tell the story of the European theater of the War through the eyes of both the famous and not so famous. This first volume deals primarily with the story of the campaigns in North Africa and Sicily, America's first involvements in that theater of the war. Among the extraordinary personalities who are such a part of this story are names that are familiar to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the war: George Patton, Erwin Rommel, Dwight Eisenhower, Mark Clark, Omar Bradley, as well as Montgomery, Churchill, Roosevelt, and yes, Adolf Hitler.

The Steel Wave

This book is the second volume of a trilogy begun with "The Rising Tide", that tells the story of the Second World War in Europe. I liked this book so much that I've already started reading "The Rising Tide". As Shaara has done so many times before, this story is told through the points of view of some of history's most colorful and dynamic characters. "The Steel Wave" focuses primarily on the Normandy campaign, what we more commonly know as "D-Day", the Allies' invasion of France.

Hampton Sides

Blood and Thunder

Hampton Sides's extraordinary book brings the history of the American conquest of the West to life. It is a tale with many heroes and villains. At the center of it all stands the remarkable figure of Kit Carson—the legendary trapper, scout, and soldier who embodies all the contradictions and ambiguities of the American experience in the West. The book covers the conquest of California, the Mexican War, how the Indians were treated, the battles with the Indians, Civil War fighting that took place in the West and much more.

Bill Sloan

The Darkest Summer

The outcome of the Korean War was decided in the first three months. Bill Sloan's The Darkest Summer is an hour-by-hour account of those months,a period that saw American and UN forces almost driven to the sea by the North Korean invaders, then stage an incredible turnaround that reversed the entire course of the war. Sloan describes how American troops, outmanned, outgunned and facing almost certain defeat, executed two brilliant military operations: repulsing the North Korean blitzkrieg through a defense of the Pusan Perimeter, and landing Marines behind enemy lines at Incheon in a daring amphibious landing. Drawing on more than fifty interviews with Korean War veterans, Sloan recounts the most historically important phase of the war from the perspective of the soldiers who fought enemy tanks with nothing more than rifles, grenades and raw courage. And he also portrays General Douglas MacArthur at his best, the Incheon landing, and at his worst, his reckless attempt to conquer all of North Korea, which provoked Chinese troops to enter the war, eventually leading to MacArthur's dismissal by President Truman. The Darkest Summer is a remarkable account of a pivotal moment in military history.

Frank Smith

Act of Vengeance

In the opening scene of the latest Detective Paget novel, the unthinkable happens-- Detective Chief Inspector Paget's throat is slashed in the parking lot immediately behind the police station. Two investigations ensue. The first, as Paget hangs on to life in the hospital, is conducted by members of the Broadminster, Shropshire, police force, centering on the mentally unstable ex-husband of a woman constable. The second investigation starts with Paget's own tortured flashbacks to the accidental death of his wife and his growing sense that her death in an explosion and his own attack are somehow related. More throat slashings follow and the now-recovered Paget seeks the thread that holds all the murders together.

Thread of Evidence

Building contractor James Bolen is found brutally murdered in a posh hotel room in Broadminster, yet Detective Chief Inspector Neil Paget reads more into a crime scene made to look like a local prostitute fatally stabbed the victim. Suspecting the killer had targeted the builder with a vengeance, Paget looks to Bolen's family and business partners for clues, and uncovers a twisted skein of secrets, vendettas, greed and duplicity. Convinced that the missing prostitute - seen fleeing the hotel that night - can identify the killer, Paget and his partner, John Tregalles, scour the missing girl's turf . . . and find yet another body. In the shadows, a killer plots. In her secret hideaway, the terrified young woman waits. Now Paget must race against time - and a killer - to keep her alive.

Allen Steele

Spindrift

Set in the same universe as Hugo-winner Steele's popular trilogy that began with Coyote (2002), this fascinating supplement concentrates on events that happen offstage after Coyote Rising (2004). When Earth detected a large alien artifact drifting past a distant star, a hastily organized and fractious expedition was sent to investigate. Communication failed just after the Earth crew arrived on the scene and began exploring, so everyone was presumed lost. But 56 years later the only surviving crew of the EASS Galileo return to earth via the starship Robert E. Lee from Coyote. As John Shillinglaw, director general of the European Space Agency, waits nervously for the vessel to dock, he ponders the mystery. Theodore Harker, 1st Officer; Jared Ramirez, astrobiologist; and Emily Collins, pilot; have been missing for fifty-six years. Where have they been and why have they come back now? This latest installment describes what the ill-fated expedition discovered, what went wrong and how the 3 saved themselves.

Galaxy Blues

Another good book in Steele's Coyote series. Expelled from the Union Astronautica space fleet, Jules Truffaut faces a future on the ground. So he stows away on a Coyote Federation starship to Coyote, arriving via a crash landing in a stolen lifeboat. To avoid deportation back to Earth and prison, he joins an expedition to the aliens of Rho Coronae Borealis, with whom a swashbuckling billionaire wants to establish trade relations. Managing to offend aliens and employers alike, Truffaut is tapped to pilot a mission to a rampaging black hole. Truffaut's bad luck rouses speculation about his competence, but his determination and lack of self-pity make him a pleasure to tag along with. All in all I enjoyed this book.

Wallace Stroby

Gone 'til November

From the urban jungles of New Jersey to a sleepy Florida town, a ruthless killer blazes a bloody trail ... and a young mother must risk everything to protect what she loves. Shots ring out on a lonely Florida road, and Sheriff's Deputy Sara Cross finds herself the unwilling witness to the killing of a young black man, gunned down while fleeing a routine traffic stop. A single mother raising an ailing six-year-old, it's bad enough that she's the only female deputy in a town where everyone knows your business. But now Morgan, an aging enforcer for a brutal New Jersey drug gang, has come to town to settle some debts, and Sara soon finds herself torn between love and duty, loyalty and the truth ... and just trying to stay alive.

The Barbed-Wire Kiss

Long Branch, Asbury Park, Ocean Grove. The Jersey Shore ain't what it used to be, but ex-N.J. State Trooper Harry Rane still calls it home. After his wife's death, Harry got careless, got shot, and left the force. He's a changed man, leading a quiet life, except when it comes to helping his friends. Now an old buddy of Harry's wants a big favor. He owes $50,000 to a wannabe Jersey crime boss and needs Harry to get him more time to repay the loan. That sounds like a plan ... except for the green-eyed, redheaded complication. The mobster's married to a woman who once fell hard for Harry. And history is about to repeat itself.

The Heartbreak Lounge

Johnny Harrow is back home in New Jersey after seven years in a Florida prison - and he has some scores to settle. Foremost is with his ex girlfriend, Nikki Ellis, who gave their child up for adoption and wants Johnny out of her life forever. As Johnny follows her trail through the back alleys and barrooms of the Jersey Shore, Nikki turns to ex-state trooper Harry Rane to protect her. But even Harry isn't quite prepared for the murderous force of nature that is Johnny Harrow...

James L. Swanson

Chasing Lincoln's Killer

Based on rare archival material, obscure trial manuscripts, and interviews with relatives of the conspirators and the manhunters, CHASING LINCOLN'S KILLER is a fast-paced thriller about the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth: a wild twelve-day chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., across the swamps of Maryland, and into the forests of Virginia. "This story is true. All the characters are real and were alive during the great manhunt of April 1865. Their words are authentic and come from original sources: letters, manuscripts, trial transcripts, newspapers, government reports, pamphlets, books and other documents. What happened in Washington, D.C., that spring, and in the swamps and rivers, forests and fields of Maryland and Virginia during the next twelve days, is far too incredible to have been made up." So begins this fast-paced thriller that tells the story of the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth and gives a day-by-day account of the wild chase to find this killer and his accomplices.

George Walsh

Whip the Rebellion

How the unprepossessing Ulysses S. Grant, whose military genius ultimately preserved the Union, came to the forefront in the Civil War is a story as surprising as it is compelling. Forced to resign his commission in the peacetime army for drinking, and thereafter reduced to eking out a living for himself and his family with hardscrabble jobs, at the outbreak of hostilities he suddenly found himself a colonel, and then a general, of volunteers. Grant made the most of unexpected commands. what he knew best, it turned out, was how to wage war, relentlessly and with irresistible force. "Whip the Rebellion" were Grant's watchwords every day of the war. This dramatic narrative--peopled with the heroics of hundreds of officers and enlisted men, crammed with first-hand accounts of battles, tactics, and civilian hardships--offers fresh insights into both the public and personal lives of Grant and his immediate circle.